School Journal | Log 0

This article is intended to be the first (or more correctly the zeroth) in a long list of articles. I have for almost 3 years now been playing around with the idea of learning in public. In some shape or form I have rather infrequently published articles, updated pages on my website or posted YouTube videos. The fundamental idea behind all of these disorganised attempts has been to have fun with the process of learning, and to make this process publicly visible.

I have till date been rather deliberately disorganised with these attempts. My thinking was that a lack of enforced structure gives me more freedom to jump around from one topic or idea to another. And that freedom would hopefully ensure that I stayed consistent. Whether or not a lack of organisation structure is to blame, I have definitely not been very consistent. In this refreshed attempt, I am trying to bring some new structure and order to the way in which I learn in public.

What is this school journal all about?

I am trying to create and test out a process of learning by re-learning all those topics which one expects to learn over the course of childhood. I would like this process to be:

• Fun and self driven rather than 100% prescriptive and tied to curriculum
• Well rounded and not just bound to the scope currently covered in schools

As for why I am doing this and what I hope to achieve, that is a little more vague even to myself. I do not hope to re-engineer the way in which schools teach or anything that ambitious. After all, I am no education expert, and I am very much exploring these ideas for the first time myself. However, I have had the privilege of enjoying a lot of my schooling years. This is probably thanks to a combination of great teachers and a nurturing home environment. I would therefore like to make the most of a love for learning and explore what the learning process could look like, if one were to enjoy the process from very early on.

I have chosen to go through the process of learning sort of from scratch, to explore the opportunity of asking and answering many questions that I did not in my younger years. This could be a strange process, since I have already learnt many things that I am trying to teach myself now. That of course would act as a bias, preventing me from truly learning in an open-ended and curious manner.

Nonetheless, this is the attempt that I have decided I shall make. And this “school journal” shall act as my log of what I’m learning and how.

Beyond the school journal

I shall attempt to use a series of articles to capture my rough notes. These should be a reflection of my direct thinking and the most immediate record of my learning process. Additionally, I would like to summarise what I have learnt every now and then, to create content which might be more directly useful for others. After all, success for this project would mean that better minds than my own take something that I have created and build something greater out of it. I believe that I might post this sort of summarised content on my website or YouTube channel.